Tazria. Beyond the klipot

As I write these lines, Yom HaAtzmaut is coming to an end in Israel.

The reclining moon is shining peacefully in the sky.

Nothing seems to remind us of what was happening just yesterday: violent fires around Jerusalem.

What a metaphor, I thought to myself.

Yes, the world is on fire. It burns with the hatred of those who seek to destroy my country and my people — and also with the hatred within my own people, which is now tearing my country apart from within.

Sometimes I wonder, what is left for us to hope for?

We often think of Olam HaBa — the World to Come — as an ideal reserved for some Messianic future.But for the Sfat Emet, it is already a present reality.We simply have to remove the klipa — the shell.

This is how he explains the meaning of Brit Milah — circumcision — in this week’s parasha.

Under his pen, brit milah is the embodied gesture by which we remind ourselves that real truth lies hidden beneath the surface appearances of “this world” — the olam hazeh.

What the rite of circumcision signifies — through the physical act of removing a piece of flesh that covers the male infant’s organ — is the importance of not remaining at the material level of things, of not stopping at appearances.

Circumcision becomes a physical enactment of the gesture of uncovering a klipa — a shell that covers our interiority — in order to enter more deeply into intimacy with the source of life.

And far beyond the ritual itself, according to the Sfat Emet, the circumcision described in our parasha is a symbol we are meant to carry with us throughout our lives: a call to spiritual work, a daily task for each of us — whether man or woman — to peel back the layers that cover our hearts.

Perhaps then the fires that consume us will calm a little.

And perhaps this Shabbat of Tiferet, this third week of the Omer count, is an invitation to do just that.

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